If a picture paints a thousand words....

If a picture paints a thousand words, how few words can I use to describe succinctly the beauty in an image such as this?

White sunlight shattered and scattered into its rainbow parts, reflecting from blood red Waratah blossoms, framed by translucent copper sprouting along a plum twig, amid shadow-dappled, chlorophyll-glossed leaves breathing verdant life and beauty into the garden.

See how that flower calls to the eye, even from a distance, surrounded and almost hidden by a tangled quilt of branches, twigs, leaves, needles, and shadows.  It wants to be seen, no matter how thoroughly the other plants may try to conceal it.  Such beauty cries out for a story, and I have encountered several stories explaining the vivid colour of the Waratah.

In one, the flower - once white - is stained red with the blood of a Wonga Pigeon that is wounded by a hawk while seeking its mate.  In another, the red is given to the flower by the blood of a Black Snake that is wounded defending a human child of its totem - while a third story has the flower coloured red by a fiery cataclysm of falling stars.

How old are such stories?  For how long have our ancestors being weaving words to pass on to their descendants the stories of the beauty of the world we all live in?  What is it that drives us to record and describe the world we see - to pass our observations on to those far away in space and time? 

What exactly were they trying to tell us with those stories?

Now cameras are now ubiquitous, and many people use pictures with minimal captions or no words at all, allowing the picture to tell the story or ask the question.  Are cameras displacing descriptive writing?  Often, yes - or so it seems.  But what does a picture tell us if there is no story accompanying it, or embedded in it, meshing into a wider culture that the viewer knows and understands?

Before cameras there were other images - before written or printed words, there were images - paintings on cave walls, carvings, images on wood or clay or stone or bark - representations to assist in the remembering and telling of stories.  Such methods are still in use, and just as DVDs failed to eliminate vinyl records from the world, and ebooks have had to live along side the paper-leaved books they were supposed to be replacing, modern technology will not eliminate our need to create images with our hands and our tongues.

For, in the end, what do we have with which to show others that we were here, thinking and feeling and loving, but the images we offer in the words we speak or sign, or the images we scratch or draw or paint? And will they understand what we offered them?

How Can You Tell?

How often have you read in a book review a comment on the use of, or presence of, an "Unreliable Narrator"?  Whenever I have encountered a reviewer commenting on the presence of an unreliable narrator, I feel that the implication is that most narrators are reliable - or, at least, the reader is entitled to expect the narrator to be reliable. 

We as readers seem to expect the fiction we read to make sense - to have a logically connected beginnning, middle, and end.  Indeed, most readers would be disappointed if there were not some sort of moral to the story.  How often have you seen criticism heaped upon the head of an author who has left the reader too far "up in the air" with no promise of a sequel to tidy up the loose ends?  We only tend to suspect unreliability in the narrator if the author drops some clues into the story that point us in that direction.  But, in real life, how reliable is any narrator?

There is an abundance of scientific research that explains why this is so; our minds actively seek patterns, relationships, and causation in the world around us, including our leisure reading activities.  The willing suspension of disbelief can be shattered when too much of the story just does not make sense to us.

There is also, however, a plethora of research that shows just how unreliable any narrator - including ourselves - can be.  Memory is plastic, our minds can never cope with all the data coming in at any given moment, and must selectively filter and focus on a part of that data, excluding or pushing to one side the rest of it.

Police, for example know this, and understand that different witnesses to an event will give different accounts - and will often feel quite certain of the accuracy of their account.  Lawyers know it too, and take advantage of it in court by pretending that the jury should believe that any conflict in the evidence is proof that it is false and misleading - yet those same lawyers, if they detect too high a level of consistency between the evidence, say, of two police, will immediately pounce with accusations of collusion in, and fabrication of, said evidence.  In both instances, the lawyers may or may not be right, but how is the poor jury to know?

In real life, we know, or should know, that someone telling us a story may or may not be reliable, and that we may need to draw on extra resources to assess the accuracy of facts or opinions offered to us.

Do we have a rational way of determining the reliability of that narrator? Probably not - most humans seem to rely on a mix of prejudices, learned experiences, and ancient instincts to judge the reliability of a narrator, and we often, to our cost, get it wrong.

We, individually, and in groups, build our own story on the stories we have seen and heard and - to some degree or another - believed.  Are all those story building-blocks reliable?  Is our input into the story reliable?  Are our memories reliable?  Confused?

Good - when we are writing fiction, we need to keep this in mind; it is highly unlikely that any of our characters are telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  It is equally likely that other characters will be listening through their own set of filters, interpreting the protagonist's words and actions differently than the protagonist intended. 

A good example of this would be Muriel Barbery's book Gourmet Rhapsody.  Each chapter is short; most are narrated by the main character - the famous food critic - while the rest are narrated by various people (and animals) who were, to a greater or lesser extent, part of his life.  There is overlap, and there are contradiction - each narrator seems to be sincere; so who does the reader believe?

I could not say how many times I have worked behind a bar, filling glasses, wiping spilt beer, and observing as a story is told and re-told over a space of hours; watching it grow and change with each repeating, until the gap between the first edition and the last is so great that it would be hard to believe that they were about the same incident - only the names of the people and places involved are the same - mostly. 

And yet, if challenged, the teller at the end would usually be as certain of the accuracy of that account as he or she had been about the first version.  And as for the version I hear the next day, after the story has been taken home to new audiences, re-told, embellished, polished, and re-presented, even the names have started to change by then.

So, let your characters lie, exaggerate, conceal, contradict, omit, forget, mis-speak, mis-interpret, and misunderstand; after all, they are only human.

Knowing your world

It is said that many hunter-gatherer peoples offered thanks to the spirits of the animals and plants that they took for food, giving gratitude and respect for the gift of life.  And straight away, I must digress - I used that term "hunter-gatherer" because it is what I learned in school, over 50 years ago, and yet books like Dark Emu, by Dr. Bruce Pascoe, show just how intensively and intentionally those supposed "gatherers" intervened to increase the productivity of their territory.  Back to the story.

At some point in human history, before cities formed and empires grew, deities were named and thanked as being the directors or providers of weather, fertility, and food.  Stories of creation were told, genealogies handed down, and sagas and epics were chanted to remind us of the deeds and misdeeds of our ancestors and their enemies.  People could identify a story within which they lived, and picture their own place in it, as well as locating all the life and landscape around them.

The cities appeared, and kings, and emperors, who took to themselves the title of divine, and exercised control - they claimed - over all the resources the people needed.  As king fought king, and empires rose and fell, many people sheltered in the cities, while beyond the walls, the slaves and peasants continued to fish, farm, and hunt.

Is that when humans began to look less closely at, as well as appreciate less, the plants, animals, and things that we use for nourishment, medicine, comfort, and clothing?  When their gratitude shifted to the kings and emperors?

Those hunter-gatherers were living in, and respecting, the world that gave them being, nurtured them, and took them at their end - sometimes even brought about their end.  Their civilized cousins had walled themselves in, putting the natural world at a greater distance, though the enemy that had inspired the wall was actually other people.

We live in that same world - it is still the source of all, excepting sunlight, that we need for life and comfort.  In the case of sunlight, the atmosphere that filters that light, and protects us from its excesses, exists only because of life.

Yet every year it seems that more and more humans reach adulthood with no real knowledge or understanding of the world we rely on.  How can we have respect for our home if we do not understand it?

Baba Dioum wrote: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught"

The world we live in is complex beyond our ability to fully understand. Our brains, facing a flood of data, have developed mechanisms to filter and sort through all that information.  We seek patterns in the data, and try to develop a sense of cause and effect for every thing we see, hear, feel, taste, and sense. We seek a sense of certainty and safety, and tailor our stories accordingly.

Yet, when we have made for ourselves a story that is comforting in its certainties, we have placed ourselves at risk of real harm. We know our world only partially - it is rare that we can be absolutely certain of our future, even that which is only seconds away.  As for next week, month, or year, certainty is a dangerous illusion.

A story that takes into account such uncertainty, and helps us reach for the skills and resilience we might use when the unexpected arrives, is a better story - and, who knows, the unexpected might be more wonderful than we have imagined?

A comfortable story is a risky story because it can lead us into a sense of false security, so that we do not pay such careful attention to the world around us - its inhabitants and their behaviour.  It is when you stop paying attention that the nasty surprises can sneak up on you, and the serendipitous opportunities slip by unnoticed.  But attentiveness and alertness use energy, and we humans have another useful habit - we like to conserve energy.  Some might call it laziness, some might call it sensible, but our ancestors learned not to burn energy unnecessarily, especially when their next meal might not eventuate as soon as hoped for.  Like all human traits, it has its up sides and its down sides.

To survive and flourish, we need a story that makes sense of the world we live in, and gives us purpose, hope, and direction. With the aid of our ancestors, we learn and develop a story by which we live.  Each of us has our own unique story - though it may contain many elements in common with the stories of those around us, it also is built from moments of personal experience and thought that no one else can fully share.

Our story is also influenced by the stories we hear and see - and many of the stories we encounter in the media or online are not honest tales.  In many cases they are created, constructed, designed, and polished so as to distort our personal story in ways that benefit the makers of those stories.  Yes, you can think "advertisers" or "politicians" when you read those words, and you would be partly right, but there are others creating and foisting dodgy stories on the world, and doing so for reasons not always explicable or reputable.

Many of the stories that wash over us every day have very narrow interests at their heart, and if we are to create an honest and useful story for our own life we need to be able to discern which of those  stories should be discarded, and which ones kept. To do that, I think we need to spend time with other people that is not filtered or mediated by technology, and when we have had our fill of people, we need time in nature - real nature, not pictures and sounds on the screen or page. 

Real people and real nature enter our story by way of all our senses, not just the visual and auditory - perhaps that is why the poetry and writing that most moves us contains cues for all our senses, too.

Homo Narrans, waving the flag, or not.

The text books refer to humans as Homo Sapiens - Man the wise - but there are many who think we are better named as Homo Narrans - Man the storyteller.  How crucial to each of us is our story - who we think we are, where we think we came from, and where we think we are going.

If you don't think this is so, consider the orphan - how often people who discover that they are orphans will go to incredible lengths to find their biological parents.  The library shelves are thick with books describing the journeys of people in search of their stories, their ancestry, their families; fiction, non-fiction, memoir, or biography, they are among the most borrowed books in the collection.

Perhaps, deep down, we all have an instinct for just how much of our family story - our people's story - has gone missing in transmission.  Stories are lost when illness, accident, plague, war, or disaster come unexpectedly upon a people.

If you are the bearer of a name such as Griffiths, Weekes, Weadon, Jones, or Davies, then there will be gaps in the stories of you and your past, as the Cymro went through a time, not so long ago, where they were forbidden the use of their own language even in their own land, Cymru, and thus, the proper telling of their stories.  Even now, most of us will call your ancestors The Welsh - a name derived from a Saxon word for foreigner - thus naming them as strangers in their own land, as less worthy than those who conquered.

Are you perhaps a Campbell, a Riley or a Munro?  How many stories were extinguished from among the tales of your ancestors as the armies of the Romans and the Danes and the Saxons and the Norman kings marched to and fro across the green hills or Britain and Ireland.  How many more stories were wiped from memory in the mud of Flanders, or The Blitz, or on the beaches of Normandy?

How fascinated have we been, over the years, by the books and movies that tell us some part of those stories that have fallen out of our family trees? How many peoples, all around the world, are presently struggling to keep alive their story, their tongue, their tales - often in the face of conquest either military or economic?

There is hardly a place on this planet that has not suffered the bitter storms of conflict and conquest at some time in recent centuries, many are presently in the throes of such horror as we sit here - and in most of those places, there are survivors, trying desperately to keep their story alive.  Their stories are no less worthy of being told or being heard because they or their ancestors were outnumbered or outgunned or susceptible to the deseases brought by the invaders.

In Australia, the descendants of those who were here before 1788 have kept alive a wonderful fund of stories to offer to the national story, despite the terrible holes torn in the ranks of their story tellers by bullets, germs, poison, and dispossession.  It is terrible to think of how much was lost during those times.

There are many still living among the First Peoples who recall being punished for speaking in their own language, just as the Welsh were, years ago, in Wales, and so many others were, or are, in other places around the world.  It is not the only place such things have happened, and, sadly, it is likely to happen again in other times and places.

Here in Australia, on Australia Day, there are still those - even among those who govern - who are trying to pretend that the voices of those that were here before 1788 should not be heard, that their stories should not, or need not be told, or, if they feel they must tell them, that they should speak them softly, so as not to offend.  The nation would be a richer and better place if all its stories, of all its people, were given equal places in the greater tale that is Australia.

When the Landlords Come Calling

Along with Drop Bears, deadly spiders, poisonous snakes, and sharks that queue up for their turn to eat surfers, one of the most internationally known and feared denizens of the plethora of lethal Aussie wildlife is the magpie.  Aussies as well as tourists are brought up on a diet of stories that paint magpies, like snakes, as aggressive beasts that are waiting for any opportunity to attack.

Take my own example, in the picture below, of what can happen if the hapless Aussie homeowner makes the mistake of leaving the screen door open for even a few seconds......

Well, in truth, it is an instance of just how intelligent these birds are.  Though they try very hard to seem fearsome when defending their nestlings for a few months each year (and yes, injuries have happened, eyes damaged, blood drawn) for the most part they are, if spoken to the right way, friendly, happy birds who get along well with humans - albeit on their own terms.  They had seen me outside, had spoken to me, and I had spoken back.  When I came inside to find some food for them, they followed.  When I pointed out the door and told them to go outside, they did.  Do they speak English?  I doubt it - but they seem to read intent from tone of voice, body language, and gesture, just as cats and dogs seem to do.

As for ferocity - I have seen them chased off the veranda rail by a brown cuckoo dove who felt he had more right to be there, and have watched them playing tag with toddler grandchildren.  The magpies in the picture are part of a family that we refer to as our landlords.  Our house is one of several within their territory.

They regularly fly down to our front door and sing to us until offered a little bit of minced meat - our rent, so to speak.  From their vantage point at the kitchen window they can see where the mince is kept - in the refrigerator - and as soon as we go to the frig to get it out, they become excited, and shift their position to the front door.  If we are too slow to respond, they will fly to other windows, looking in, and sometimes gently tapping on the glass.

Magpies can remember individual human faces for years, and will learn new songs from humans who still retain the skill of whistling.  I have found them, during the warmer parts of the day, sitting in a shady spot, practicing not only their regular, beautiful carolling, but also the songs of other birds from around the neighbourhood.

As well as the magpies, there are doves, rosellas, wattle birds, kookaburras, butcher birds, currawongs, king parrots, honey-eaters, ducks, and a swirl of other little birds, that all come, at some time or another, to sit on our veranda rail, or fossick through our gardens in pursuit of sustenance and shelter.

They are not pets - we don't own them.  If anything, they own us - a part of us, at least, that would be less without their company.  They seem to grow used to our presence, and to be able to identify our normal patterns of behaviour.  The magpies, for example, long ago learned to follow me into the garden if I am carrying a fork or hoe.  They will stand only inches away from my boots, waiting to pounce on any worm or grub that my digging turns up.

The king parrots are another remarkable bird, and I suspect they have a memory and intelligence every bit as good as that of the magpies.  They, too, address their communications directly to whichever of us is present - looking us in the eye and using particular whistles and calls.

It is a source of great pleasure and joy to have the company of these creatures.  They come and go according to their own schedules and priorities, but they seem to know us as having our own place withing their territories.  We seem to have been classified as fellow inhabitants of the natural space they dwell in, instead of being regarded as predators.

The Age Old Conflict - Everything Old is News Again

Story and denial, fact and counter-fact, news and fake news - the call and response of society and politics in this world of hi-tech, high-speed communications is loud, complex, and confusing.

While the truth rests on the editor's desk, scrutinized by the fact-checkers and the lawyers, the rumours, spin, and propaganda are already spreading like a blizzard of termite queens seeking new homes as the summer afternoon storms approach.

Only some will find a fertile place to lodge, but those that do will feed and breed in the darkness, spreading out to consume and corrupt the structure that took them in.  Soon, unprotected, adjacent premises are being eaten away from within, and the rot spreads.

Every story we read, whether it be labelled Fiction or Non Fiction, contains varying quantities of objective reality and subjective truths, blended by the author to achieve a certain aim, and interpreted by each reader according to their own experience-based filters.  Many an author (or poet, or movie maker) has been utterly astounded by the meanings that readers have taken from his or her work - many readers are astounded when the author declares that "that is not what I meant by those words"

But, we live by stories - they make a foundation that underpins our lives, and offer us ways to understand the swirling world around us.  Stories offer us hope in the grim times, and hold up the warning hand of bitter experience as a caution against our naive optimisms.

Like the great cables of twisted rope that hold the ocean liner fast to the dock, the vast story of humanity contains within it so many twists of lesser stories, wound about each other in complex spirals that add strength to the whole.

Or like a tapestry stretching the length of human existence, only partly visible to us in the light of the present, and always under construction at the edge that leads into the shadows of the future, the stories add strength, colour, and sometimes even pattern, to the whole.

Flawed stories, stories in which truth is twisted or absent, stories darkened by malice or anger or envy, stories twisted by the teller for personal gain - all these stories can mar the patterns of the great tapestry, or weaken the cable.  Stories of fear and despair make the world a smaller, darker place.  If such stories are being told by people in positions of great power, the damage wrought can be much greater, too.

Tell your story, add some light and colour to the larger story - read or listen to the light-filled stories of others, and join your thread with theirs to brighten the picture of the future.  The human story grows and brightens when such stories are added to the weave.

Your story contains the stories - at least in part - of those who you knew or lived with or worked with or watched or read about, just as the present is built on and from the past, yet also shaped by the stories we tell ourselves about our futures.

It is too easy for the dominant stories of the day to overshadow the many stories being told by fainter voices - yet those stories, less widely known but far greater in number, have made their own unique contributions to the greater picture, and deserve our remembrance.

Consider books such as Radical Sydney  and its associated blog, that try to keep alive stories of Sydney, recent and ancient, that often contradict the "official" line, and might have otherwise faded from view.  Those who seek to impose their paradigm on a culture or society often try to bury the stories that present opposing viewpoints, but dissenting stories can be very hard to stamp out.

Consider the fiction of Robert G Barrett - though many of his later works contained fantastical elements, they also contained traces of those same stories of the other Sydney, while his early books and short stories painted scenes and portraits that would be instantly recognisable to anyone who worked or lived around the eastern suburbs of Sydney in the seventies.  Only the names were changed, and some of by not very much.

As a parting thought, I've heard it said that the Silly Season in Australia begins on Melbourne Cup Day, and ends on Australia Day.  It seemed an odd thing to say, for a moment, but then the memories began to flood back - of holidays and parties and birthdays and bushfires and sunburn and storms - and it suddenly seemed apt, because no matter what the weather or the world situation was trying to throw at us at the time, there was always, somewhere, a bunch of Aussies throwing a party or putting on a barbecue.

Yet the beginning and the end of the Season are marked by days about which so many different and often conflicting stories are told.  For every story of victory at the races there is at least one opposing story of fortunes lost, or horses or jockeys killed or maimed - and as for Australia Day, if you don't know about the conflicting stories gathering around that day then, what can I say.  You must have been partying extra hard not to have noticed that particular barney.

Room for Mountains Writers

 I recently had the pleasure of attending the official opening of the WestWords Western Sydney Writer's Rooms, also known as Katoomba: The Den 24/7

The well-appointed writer's space is situated in the basement of Gallery One88, and was officially launched on Saturday 16th December, before a large gathering of local writers and artists.

Welcome to country was beautifully spoken and sung by Uncle Lex Dadd, after which, local author Libby Gleeson – one of the original founders of the institution - gave an introduction to the history and purpose of Westwords and the writer's rooms and writing programs established under its auspices.

Well known local authors, Tohby Riddle and Jennifer Rowe – known for her works as Emily Rodda, amongst other things – also addressed the crowd.

Though officially a 'basement', the writer's room is a large space, well decorated with local artworks and furnished with a number of large, comfortable writing desks. Information about access, fees, membership, and services (including free wi-fi), can be found at the Westwords website.

The space is set up in co-operation with the owners of Gallery One88, and can be accessed 24/7 by writers who have signed up with Westwords for a weekly, monthly, or six monthly membership.

The Blue Mountains is an area awash with creativity, being home to many writers and artists of varying degrees of fame or notoriety.  For those of you who might be seeking the fellowship of other aspiring writers in The Mountains, it can also be found at such places as The Blue Mountains Writers who meet at Springwood on the first Sunday of each month, or a less formal group of writers who meet at Katoomba Library from 1pm to 3pm on the second Sunday of each month (if interested, turn up with a pen and some paper, and say hello - we don't bite)  Examples of some of the work from this group can be found on the Library page Writers in The Mist as well as on other pages of this blog, or these blogs - Offerings from the Wellspring and Musings from The Mountains.

Varuna House is another dedicated writers space that is worth keeping in contact with, as they host a number of interesting events every year, as well as offering scholarships and programs to assist aspiring writers, while the NSW Writers Centre offers lots of useful resources, as does the Australian Society of Authors.

We all carry a folder full of stories around inside us - let some of your stories out to play.  Better still, take them out in the company of other writers, like the ones you will find in the writer's groups, or at the writers rooms.  Writing only seems like it should be a solitary art until you have had the pleasure of working with other like-minded people, and discovering that you are not alone - we are all makers of stories, and the right writing company may help you find stories you did not know you had.

Who knows where the words will take you?

Here is another little offering from a prompt-based session of our library writer's group.  This is the prompt that was offered to us for inspiration..................

 Someone throws a coin in a wishing well, what is their story?

I had no idea where this story was going at first.  It seemed important to establish an observer and a setting to be observed, so, after a few moments wondering where I might find an interesting wishing well, fragments of old stories and movies gave me the idea of a small square somewhere in Rome. I have tidied it up a little, and added a paragraph to round it out - it may yet act as the core of a longer story, or a scene in some larger work.  I keep all these little pieces - I often don't know from what dark corner of my mind they have emerged, and can never be certain that they may not come in handy one day.

We work to a time limit - from ten to twenty minutes is typical - so the pen needs to hit the paper fairly quickly.  During my first session at a writing group, the time limit seemed like a choke-collar around my neck, but it soon turned into a useful spur - I learned to start scribbling and see what words flowed onto the page.  

It is one of the most useful lessons I have thus far been given.  When the ink is not flowing, the story is not moving.  The following story was my response to this prompt -

The Well.

I normally take my lunch in a small piazza behind the Palazzo Grimaldi.  It's quieter, and more sheltered from the hot winds, than the larger, more popular spots.  There is an ancient bougainvillea that reaches out of a tiny garden to stretch its thick shade across a little stone bench.

It's comfortable, private, and peaceful - away from my co-workers and clients alike.  Almost no one else ever comes here, which is why I was so surprised to see a young woman from an adjacent office appear in the little square.  She had entered the piazza from the narrow lane that once allowed covert access to the Palazzo.

She paused and looked around.  I waited for her to greet me – Suzanna, I remembered her name at last – but the bright sunlight must have dazzled her.  I remained unseen in my little patch of shadow as she slowly advanced across the hot paving towards the ancient well.  Her eyes were lowered, and hands were clasped, as if in prayer.  A tiny gem crawled down her cheek, and I realised that she was crying.

She stopped a pace short of the ancient stonework, with its time-worn carvings that might have been satyrs and fauns.  There was a legend associated with that well, I knew – but what was it?  I ransacked my aging memory in search of the story.  The fountain that trickled from the mouth of what might have been a wolf had been filling that well since before the Emperors usurped the Roman Republic.

Healing, that was it – there was some legend of healing.  Very good, I thought, my memory is not yet completely washed away by the ebbing tide of years.  Though I felt that did not fully answer my query, and I dug deeper into my memory.   

Suzanna took two short steps and stopped again at the lip of the well.  Her lips were moving, as if in speech.  She unclasped her hands, reached into her purse, and, with a small gesture, cast three gold coins into the well.

They were gold, most certainly.  I have seen gold sparkle in the sunlight, more than once during my long years, and the splashes as they entered the water were heavy – far heavier than any splash our shoddy, modern, aluminium coins would have made.  Not just healing, I remembered, but childbirth in particular – that was the story around this well.   

Speak a wish, offer a gift, and the boon would be granted.  But not by any god known to modern man – this well was truly ancient.  Even the Roman historians spoke of it as old beyond measure, and claimed that its waters flowed from the hands of the nymph Egeria.

Seeing the Trees within the Forest

In her book Understory, Inga Simpson shows that no matter how well you know a place, and how long you might live there, you can always be surprised by some new aspect of its shape, its story, and its inhabitants.  She shows, too, how perceptions can be shaped by the stories we have heard about the place and the assumptions we bring with us to that place - and how this can sometimes blind us to significant facets of the place and its stories.

Almost forty years ago, soon after I had moved to a valley that had once been the forested home of the Darkinjung People, I was working behind the bar at the Tavern that was the hub of the larger of the two villages in The Valley.  Wollombi drew its name, it was believed, from the language of those prior occupants, and signified either a meeting of waters, or a meeting place near the waters.  The other village was smaller, had a Spanish name - Laguna, possibly from a former soldier of Wellesley's Peninsula Campaign - and possessed only a Wine Bar.

A stranger of around fifty years of age came into the bar and bought a beer - he looked around and eventually asked after certain local names and families - many of them unknown to we newer residents, and most, long departed.  He was not, it turned out, a stranger to The Valley, but we were strangers to him. He had grown up in a narrow gully at the back of one of the many dairy farms that dotted the area during World War Two. After the war, he had left in search of work, as so many young men did.  Indeed, by the time I moved there, only one dairy was still operating, and the family that ran it were all well past retirement age.

He asked me, after a while "What happened to the hills?  Why did they let the place go like this?"

I asked what he meant, and he launched into a story about the hard work done by he and others, during and just after the war.  He pointed out the many forested ridges that surrounded the basin in which the village sat, nestled at the confluence of three small rivers.

"We had all those ridges clear" he said indignantly "and now they've let all the trees grow back"

He and his fathers, uncles, and neighbours, had ring-barked almost every tree on all the ridges visible from the tavern (which had been a wine bar, too, when he was young) and many other ridges further up and downstream.  He obviously felt that all their sweat and hard work had been wasted through neglect - he thought that the current landholders should have been vigilant and active in preventing any regrowth by trees. 

His tone and words told me that he believed that what they had done had been the right thing - an effort to expand the area of pasture available to the local dairies, at a time when the production of milk and butter was a vital contribution to the war effort, and a valuable addition to the local economy.  No doubt that was the story told to the farmers by the agricultural advisors of the day.

Now the hills were covered in forest again - a thriving mix of Ironbark, Stringybark, Grey Gum, Rough Barked Apple, and Blue Gum - and no local farmer would think to clear those steeper slopes again.

The erosion had been terrible, and long stretches of the Brook and of Yango Creek had seen deep, fish-filled waterholes fill with sand.  The grass growth had been worse without trees than with, and the forests were now valued as a resource that could be selectively cut through for logs, pit timber, fence posts, and firewood, as well as providing sheltered areas for the cattle during the worst of the heat and cold.

The new arrivals and younger people in the bar at the time were astounded at the story he told of dust, sweat, and hillsides covered in stark, silver-grey skeletons of the earlier forests - to us, the existing forests looked as if they had always been there - and yet he had been helping to kill those former forests only forty years earlier.  It was not the first time, either, as I subsequently was shown a very old photo of the hill behind the Wine Bar at Laguna, and it, too, was bereft of trees, though earlier and later photos showed plenty of them on the hill behind the buildings.  That picture dated to the end of the nineteenth centurey.  It seems the the fortunes of the local forest ebbed and flowed over the decades.

The few members of the older families still living in the area could have told us that story, though none did - directly.  One old ex-dairyman liked to recall, in a puzzled voice, how the area had been suddenly swamped by a surfeit of wombats, and that this had happened at the same time as all the koalas had vanished.  It was a mystery, he said, that no one had ever explained.

If we looked closely enough, the clues were there.  Although the trees that were killed in the great ringbarking effort had mostly fallen or been felled, and had been burned in piles, or carted away for firewood many years before that afternoon in The Tavern, there were still ancient stumps - mossy and half rotten - lurking in the shade of the new forest.  The man's story opened my eyes, and I soon found many more stumps as I walked the shady hillsides - some of them of a truly remarkable size.

One day, I wandered up across the western ridge of my farm - I had not had it long and was still exploring it a bit at a time.  I found a half a dozen truly enormous Blue Gums - tall, straight, and metres in circumference.  I wondered how such trees had survived, but the clue was in the shape of the gully they grew in - the confirmation came a while later when I talked to one of the older timber cutters in the area.

His comment?  "That gully had a double dog-leg in it.  The logs wouldn't shoot down, couldn't get a dozer up there to drag them out, and couldn't get a track close enough on the ridge top to winch them up.  We had to leave them"  He sounded so disappointed that he was never able to find a way to get at those trees.

Later on, I heard a story about trees that were even bigger, and still standing.  At the end of a narrow dirt road that snaked along the ridges of the Watagan Range, and plunged down deep, shady gullies to the upper reaches of the Brook that flowed through my paddocks, a small clearing had been set aside within the State Forest for campers.  The trees that surrounded that clearing, on the banks of a clear, pebbly stream, were huge.  Five or six people might have been able to link hands around the trunk of one of the smaller ones; to see their tops seemed impossible - they were too close to the clouds.

The Darkingjung, Awabakal, and Wonnarua Peoples walked among vast forests of such trees for tens of thousands of years - now a few dozen of those trees remain in odd corners of the range to remind us of what once was here.  When I had first bought the hundred acres of creek flat and ridge country that was to be my farm, I had walked among trees that seemed astounding in their size - yet it seems that almost all of them were barely moving into a stage we could call mature, especially compared to those might Grandfather Trees still lurking in their hidden corners.

I had made that all too common human mistake, and assumed that what I could see was what had always been that way.  In truth, that is so rarely the case, and if we look and listen carefully, the stories that will tell us what had gone before, and what might come again, are there, waiting.  But don't leave it too long - so many of those older story tellers are leaving us, and leaving behind no written or pictorial record.

Among the Trees

Inga Simpson has, with her latest work A Life with Trees, given us a poignant story of the constant tension between the dreams and desires we humans try to impose on "our" land, and the drives and needs of the manifold occupants - plant and animal - that were in and on that land before us, or that have arrived from elsewhere to enjoy the side-effects our decisions and actions have wrought upon that land.

Within its pages there is a resonance with my own life amid tree and pasture, and the attachment I formed to the landscapes within which I lived, and, at times, made my living.  Like her, I have moved more than once, and cleared and planted, trying to add my dreams and desires to the existing ecology, and like her I have had to compromise between dreams and the counter forces of nature and economics.

I have been enchanted by the grandeur of a place, and by the miniscule wonder and beauty that reveal themselves to the quiet traveller or sojourner.  The first view of any landscape, large or small, always contains more than the observer can take in.  We think we see it all, but our brain, as it usually does when confronted with large amounts of information via the senses, filters and simplifies - bringing to our consciousness the "big picture" first, and then the more easily identifiable aspects, with an emphasis on things about which we already have some knowledge.

Another view, in different light, weather, or season, and different aspects are highlighted - the big picture changes shape and gains texture.  Finer details begin to come to our notice, until we make that all too common mistake and think we know all about the place, and fully understand it.

Then the light changes again, or the temperature, or rain falls, or fails to fall when expected - and the view changes again as we notice previously overlooked details.  Carefuly nurtured plants die of drought, drowning, or unseen disease, while self-sown seedlings that weren't obvious only weeks before are suddenly flourishing.  Perhaps they were there all along, rendered invisible by our ignorance, or even misidentified as weeds.

Mature trees that somehow escaped notice for years, even as we lamented the absence of that species, appear under our nose (or over our heads), and supposedly rare and endangered ground orchids suddenly, and briefly, carpet a ridge top in flowers - no matter how long we dwell in a place, it can always surprise us.  And so we add to our knowledge of place, and as the surprise fades, we again grow smug about our understanding - until the next new discovery.

The store of knowledge contained in Indigenous lore is astounding, but should not surprise - there have been many millenia of gathering knowledge, arranging it, piecing it together, and passing it on for future generations.  The Australian First Peoples have been living with this place for so long that they have seen it change as the most recent glaciation cooled the planet and lowered the oceans, and they have seen it change back as the planet warmed.

They have seen old homes and fishing spots drowned by the rising oceans, and adapted as deserts grew, and forests moved and changed - all the while adding their observations and understanding to the songs that hold their memory.  Now they are seeing it change again, as human technological ability and desire for dominance once more overtakes human understanding and ethics.

A lifetime cannot be enough for a complete understanding of a place, an ecology - be it a forest, as in Inga's case, or a shore, or a marsh.  When trees can live for centuries, even passing a millenia or more in the sun and the wind, how can one person ever fully understand a forest?  But that person can live in the forest, and learn its rhythms, and love it -though those people who choose such a path are ever more often finding themselves at odds with that other branch of humanity, who, for whatever reason, see in a forest only a short term picture comprised of dollar gains and dollar costs.

Humans are creatures of story, and it is story-tellers like Inga who help people see the view that they may not previously have noticed - to see the intricate, essential to all of us, life that, without such seeing, they could too easily trample underfoot, or consign to the blade of the bulldozer or the teeth of the chainsaw.

Understory tells of that tension between the needs imposed by "economics" and "society", and the needs of life itself - the constantly growing, moving web that makes our world liveable and beautiful, and without which no amount of money or economic growth would be of any use to the human race at all.  It is a story that has been told in other forms, about other places, by so many people - it needs constant re-telling, for all our sakes.

Flowers of Memory - the Travelling Rose

My wife and a colleague were discussing a practice at some childcare centres where a child is given a seedling of a tree or bush to care for - when they are old enough to leave for school they can either take the growing tree home to plant or to the school if permission is given for it to be  planted there.

It made me recall the plants that have travelled with me as I have moved from place to place - there is the thornless, yellow, banksia rose that has come to each new place as a cutting from the place I had just left.

It is here at Wentworth falls as both a hedging plant and as a bonsai, cuttings of which I brought with me from a bush at our last house in Quakers Hill, which was struck from the rose that climbed over the outside dunny at the farm at Glyn Marchog, which was struck from the one I grew at the Old Northern Trading Post.

That, in turn, was cut from the yellow rose that climbed with the black muscat grapes across the north and west sides of the veranda at the farm at Murray's Run (about 8 or 9 kms from the village), which in turn came from the one near the house at Toongabbie, which was struck from the one my grandfather had by his aviary at Killarney Vale, which he grew from cuttings of the big one that climbed about the barn and cottage at North Parramatta, which, finally, was struck from the one next to the house at the family dairy at Wentworth Falls, around the end of World War 2.

What a journey, over the course of generations, in the form of carefully nurtured cuttings carried from old homes to new homes, that rose has made.  I wonder if the yellow banksia rose that I found growing among the weeds on a fence line here at Gwenmere shared a common parent with the ones that were growing on the dairy that once stood only three kilometres or so from where I now type?

This house stands on the same side of Jamieson Creek, though a bit further upstream, as did the dairy that fed and employed a great-grandfather, grandfather and grandmother, great-aunt, father, uncles and aunt, and assorted cousins, fosterlings, and boys from other properties about the village.  The yellow banksia rose is often seen climbing over fences in the village, especially in the older parts - sometimes in company with a beautiful white flowering sibling.  Gandpa had some of the white rose, too, but it seemed less robust than the yellow, and did not complete the long, roundabout journey with its sister and I.

Of course, there are other plants that have travelled with me too - in pots, or as cuttings or seeds or seedlings.  The bonsais are easy to move, the great lumping orchid pots less so - but they too have a long history.  Some of the orchids were handed on from grandpa, some from an old man across a long ago fence, whose  departed wife had nurtured them and won ribbons for their beautiful blooms, back in the forties, fifties, and sixties - probably in the same orchid society grandpa attended.

All of them have stories longer than my memory, and many parts of those stories are now forgotten.

How sad that is.  Here in Australia there are folk from the First Peoples who are trying to save the language and stories of their ancestors - just as other people in other lands are also doing for their own stories.  It must be terribly difficult for them when they have so often been pushed far away from the lands in which their stories grew and flourished.

My heritage is, from what I can find in the records, mostly Anglo-Celtic.  Those peoples, too, had a time in their past when the stories and genealogies were passed on from old to young through song and poetry.  The Celtic Bards were famous for the vast storehouse of information that they carried in the memory.

But was it just "in their heads"?  Or, was it, like so many of the Australian Aboriginal songs and stories, intimately linked to the landscape - the rocks, hills, streams, lakes, trees and plants, animals and insects?  Was that a part of the terrible shock so many of the early European arrivals seemed to suffer?  That their stories were adrift, unmoored, and unattached to the landscape they now walked through?

We define ourselves and our world with our stories.  The plants I have carried with me for so many decades are linked to stories and characters now long past - but not forgotten, thanks to those gorgeous blossoms that remind me each year of the other people and places in that long story of my family.

If I travel through those places where, in past years, I settled for a while, I can still find signs of my presence - flowers and trees I planted - houses, fences, barns and stockyards I built.  I can see them and straight away be pulled back into the memories of the people and happenings that made up my life in that place.  Though one place I find it hard to drive past, knowing that house I had built there, and the trees and gardens I planted and cared for, have all vanished beneath carpark paving and a double line of townhouses.

How awful it must be to be cast out of the landscape - by war or migration - in which your story was formed, or to have the landscape torn up and replaced with something alien - as so often happens now in The City on The Plain - Sydney - as the developers and politicians tear down the landmarks of so many stories in pursuit of dollars and power.

A story in a single word

Nicknames can be a story in a single word - sometimes bestowed by friends, family, or colleagues, and sometimes self-applied in an effort to convey a certain image. Think, for example, of an episode of Big Bang Theory called The Friendship Contraction - Wolowitz tries to inveigle the other astronauts into choosing "Rocket Man" but gets stuck with "Fruit Loops"

At a writer's seminar recently a young woman from the Lower Mountains mentioned recent conflict between groups of young people in the town square.  She referred to them using a term the rest of us had not previously encountered.  It sounded like "Eshays" and prompted a round of puzzled requests for repetition and explanation.

When we learned that it was a form of "gang" terminology that some of the youngsters were appropriating from American "gangsta" movies, and that it had some sort of Spanish etymology, an online search (oh, the wonders of modern technology!) soon filled in the gaps in our knowledge.

It derives from the Spanish phoneme "esse" that represents the letter "S" and is related to the term Surenos, in turn derived from Southern Californian crime gangs with a relationship to Mexican "Mafia" groups involved in drug and weapons trade in and out of the USofA.

"Eshays" has also come to be simply a term for a young man, thus a Spanish version of "Man" "Bro" or "Dude"

Yet, for the people who have taken to using it about themselves it is meant to convey to the wider world an image, an impression, a story about who they are, and how they should be treated or regarded.

Nicknames can be a remarkably concise way of describing a person, when the listeners share the cultural heritage of the narrator.  Without such sharing, the possibilities for confusion are immense - consider the practice, in Australia, in years gone by, of calling redheads "blue" or "bluey" and black-haired men "snow" or "snowy"

Some are in-jokes, reminding listeners who are in the know of some particular moment in the history of the recipient and his/her friends.  In years gone by I had a large collection of nicknames that were bestowed upon me by various friends and colleagues.  Someone asked me if I found the plethora of alternative names annoying or confusing - in fact, it helped me work out which face in the crowd was calling for my attention.  Nicknames can add to the reader's grasp of the type and history of a character, if chosen wisely.

What about pet names?  The consensus seems to be that pet names are used by only one person, who is in a relationship - familial or romantic - with the character, so tagging a character with one during dialogue can be a succinct way of indicating the relationship to the reader.  An article in the Scientific American goes into some detail on the subject.

How often should we add nicknames and pet names to the characters in a story?  Changes of name can confuse the reader, so it needs to be done well.  My cultural millieu is middle class Australian, post-World War II, so nicknames and informallity in conversations are a crucial part of social interactions - is it thus in other cultures? How do you go about choosing names for your characters?  Do you choose them before the story begins rolling along?  Do you find yourself wanting to change them later, as their personality develops over the course of the writing?

I have read of authors who have gone to enormous trouble to attach the "right" name to primary characters, hoping to infuse extra layers of meaning into the story.  I have encountered novels where that effort has paid off.  For my part, I have tended to randomly reach into the well of memory and pluck out a few names, holding each up against the character as so far planned, and discarding each until I find the one that seems to fit.  It is a haphazard approach and has sometimes  led to my having to carefully go through a draft, swapping out the initial moniker for something that fits better with the persona that has grown during the work.

Does it really matter?  In real life we are named by hopeful (or confused) parents long before any inkling of our character could possibly be detected by them. Would it be more realistic if authors adopted the same policy?

Stories and the tribes that listen to them

On the NeuroLogica Blog I encountered a discussion titled "Tribal Epistemology" - by Steven Novella - and was immediately fascinated.  The author describes the evolution of his studies into the willingness of people to believe in pseudoscience; from his initial hypothesis that scientific illiteracy was the cause, through the idea that a lack of critical thinking skills was to blame, to his current position - that narrative or tribal thinking is to blame.

Steven's post is worth reading, from a writer's point of view - though it is not an optimistic reading of the current world situation as seen by a scientist with real concerns about the direction we are being taken by the various forms of illiteracy and poor thinking skills that have infested public life.

As someone trained in the scientific method, with its emphasis on identifying and confirming facts, no matter how much those facts might conflict with ones own current understanding or personally held beliefs, it must be hard to come to grips with the idea that humans will so willingly set aside facts that conflict with their own pre-existing beliefs.

Authors, poets, playwrights, and storytellers have long known this truth about humans, though.  A great story, well told, can change belief in the audience. But authors beware if, in the hope of inflicting your own beliefs on others, you present your reader with a thinly disguised moral or political lecture. An audience seeking entertainment will almost certainly see through a thin plot and poor characterisation to the moralising within, and is unlikely to put up with it.

Story tellers will recognise that the reader desires a story that they can believe, even as they understand that the story is made up.  Fiction writers take the reality they have experienced and observed and rework it - taking what can be a chaotic and apparently unconnected collection of facts and weaving the material into a tale with continuity, meaning, and value for the reader.  Is this not what we have been doing with the world around us for so many millennia - trying to reduce a vast mass of incoming data to a manageable and meaningful narrative?

Of course, the snake-oil salesman and the charlatans have long known how to spin a tale the audience is willing to believe - without such a skill they would be broke, and would be run out of town in very short order.  And there, as in so many other areas of human expertise, is the trap.  Just as our ability to manage and control sharp edges, fire, chemical reactions, and so many other things, has given us wealth and comfort and safety, so have those same skills brought us pain, misery, and death.

Our skill with, and love of, narrative is as much of a two-edged sword as any box of matches or sharp knife can be. Stories can give us a sense of right and wrong, a feeling of community with our fellow humans, and a body of lore that will help us and our children to live well in the world - or they can twist our understanding of reality in ways that can ruin that same world.

Why do people fall for the wrong stories?  I wonder if it is because we have, as a species, a natural inclination to do enough to get comfortable, but not too much more?  If we have collected enough stories to make a comfortable narrative for ourselves, and have found a comfortable tribe to be with - one whose members share that same narrative - why make ourselves uncomfortable by looking too closely into stories that might invalidate that narrative?

Or is it simply because every society has its own version of the warning "curiosity killed the cat"?

We know from observation that babies and small children are determined in their curiosity.

Everything is interesting to babies and toddlers.  Before they can talk or walk, and often for a long time after they can, everything is picked up and examined. Each new object is tested with every means at their disposal, including biting, pulling, and tossing.  Why does that curiosity fade?  Is it, as some people suggest, that adults and the education system somehow crush it through the imposition of uniformity and regulation?  Could it be that most humans reach a point where the facts they have collected are "good enough" to form a world view?  That once a satisfactory narrative has been composed, the natural inclination for many is to "leave well enough alone"?

It is possible - how often do we see people who have been resistant to the "facts" of others suddenly shaken out of their old world view by some personal encounter with disaster?  We see their horror as a comfortable old narrative is suddenly shattered by events, and beliefs held as certain collide with unexpected reality.

Is that not the goal of the song writer, the poet, and the author - to string together words that jolt people with new facts and feelings, that shake them from comfort into confusion and excitement, to open eyes and ears to possibilities  that are present but have been ignored? 

Where does it Come From?

We draw material for our stories from the world, and the lives we see and hear around us - both the ones that are physically close to us, and those brought close by that two-edged sword that is modern technology.

Old farts such as myself can be fond of reminding younger people that "the human race got by for thousands of years without mobile phones, televisions, and the internet" but we can find ourselves just as thoroughly reliant on the constant, flickering flow of information and opinion as any of the generations younger than us.

While that flow of story can provide us with prompts, information, and inspiration for our own creative work, it can also overwhelm us - especially when that flow seems to be a tsunami of tragedy, and ominous behaviour and utterances from those who claim to be leading us to a better future.

It can be hard to write something in an upbeat tone when the media is full of the droning mendacity of politicians who are busily doing nothing while trying still to look competent, effective, and worthy of re-election.  It can be even harder when the various media are full of the posturing of nuclear armed bully boys.  Hope and optimism can be difficult things to find on days like that.

It is enough to send you back for another look at On The Beach, or The Earth Abides.  There is plenty of dystopian and apocalyptic literature around, full of action and drama featuring heroism or technological miracles that ultimately lead to some form of salvation and renewal for the human race.  These two old novels, however, are more likely to be true to life - a brief, dramatic disaster caused by human agency, followed by a slow and painful decline for the survivors.  At least George R. Stewart allowed nature to survive - indeed, to thrive - as humanity faded from the scene, and he did allow a glimmer of hope for homo sapiens towards the end of the novel.

Perhaps I need to throw myself back into the escapist fantasy of my youth, by authors like Asimov, Tolkien, Ransome, and Heinlein.  Or, maybe I should be re-reading my Scouting for Boys before heading out into the backyard to practice my survival skills.

Out there, I will be among the trees and gardens, surrounded by the sounds of running water, windblown leaves, and birds of all sorts - and the Scout's guide book won't be so necessary after all.  I will be instantly reminded of the good in the world.  It must be time to turn off the news and listen to life again, for whenever I do so, I find life not only persisting, but flourishing. In the recent winter warmth my ear was pulled along by a familiar buzz until it brought me to the rosemary bushes by the letter box - where I found lots of these little folk, out in numbers quite unexpected for a winter's day.

I wonder where their hive is - rosemary honey would surely be wonderful, fresh from the comb.  Incidentally, if you are a drinker of green tea, it is worth brewing a pot with a pinch of rosemary leaves, fresh from the bush - fresh plucked thyme is also a lovely addition.

Stories lost, and found.

In the galaxy of stories that is humanity, each of us orbits among the other stars of our home constellations, spinning our yarns into the thread of our story and weaving it into the vast, complex spiral.  Some weave tightly, close to other stars, warming each other, bending each others trajectories - some soar alone through the gaps and along the rim.

When a story-teller ends, when the flame sputters to its end, the constellation changes shape, and memories begin to fade and fragment.  The once tightly ordered solar system becomes a debris field to be swept up by others - or ignored and forgotten.

Though the once bright fire has been extinguished, there are still sparks and embers to be found that can tell of the glories that were, and keep some chapters, paragraphs, or even just a few phrases of the story, alive in other orbits.

Sifting through such a debris field can be joyful and utterly melancholy in the same minutes.  A dusty hoard of old cards and letters will reveal traces of dreams and nightmares, and hopes fulfilled or dashed, or even a squirrel-cache of notes or coins. A hidden diary or box of letters may reveal a surprising, even shocking, turn of events or emotions that had never been revealed before.

Carefully ordered craft cupboards, work-benches, and garden sheds have changed from places of purposeful resources to mere piles of souvenirs, as the family archaeologists assess, evaluate, allocate, or discard.

Yet, as we sort, each object still carries faint vibrations or echoes of its original task in the long story that has now ended.   A single photograph can bring all work to a stop, as the memories awaken, and a part of the story is called forth and handed around to be savoured and cherished at least one last time.  A special cup or teapot from childhood visits, long ago, or the hand-made apron that allowed the visitor to join in the work at the kitchen table, and the searcher is back in the early days of their own story.

And so the severed threads can be woven into another part of the great tapestry, continuing a weave and weft that may have been handed on over many generations. Souvenirs are often found that tell of lives generations past - artefacts that have been gathered in other long ago expeditions to other darkened stars.  We are fortunate, who can sit with friends and family, amid the tears and the laughter, and dwell again in the golden age of childhood that such fragments evoke.

As well as nostalgia, there is the carefully preserved evidence of a world that no longer exists, and we remember how much has changed even in the course of our own lifetimes, let alone in the lives of those who came not so many decades before us. It often yields clues that allow the investigator to chart and date the beginning of the decline that precedes most ends, and offers all sorts of little lessons in ways that life can be lived, and enjoyed, and managed, and endured.  Those of us who can embark on such expeditions are fortunate, for so many stories end suddenly, catastrophically, or even intentionally, and final chapters are left unwritten, or erased.

Look around your constellation - cherish your stories and theirs; they can so easily be lost forever.

Conflicting Stories

Conflicting Stories:

In Communal Writing, I told a story of the OON - how it brought people together, and how it served the needs of a small community that was often under pressure from outside.

Of course, that's just one story about the OON, and others might remember other versions, or at least, other facets of the life of the newspaper and The Valley.  Was it always rosey and harmonious?

Of course not.  The Valley as a whole, and its various interest groups, had enough conflict and diversity - personal, age, gender, political, cultural, ethnic, and religious - to keep a posse of professional mediators in full time work.  In fact, most of the mediators were amateurs, and were often deeply enmeshed in the conflicts they were supposedly settling.  Everyone had their own story to tell and to weave into the larger story of life in the Valley, as well as a story of where that community sat in the world at large.

It seemed, from my vantage point behind the bars and counter-tops of the two wateringholes in The Valley, that there were more stories than there were people to tell them, and even such a small community would have furnished more than enough material to keep a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky happily employed for a lifetime or two.  Thurber would have recognised many of the characters there, too.

Often I would be privileged to witness the birth of a new story.  Some evenings, such a story would grow from an acorn to an oak tree within a dozen retellings, gaining weight and breadth with each new influx of willing listeners, and I could detect no crack in the sincerity of the author's voice, no matter how different the latest edition was from the first.

I have, too, heard stories about incidents that I was myself present at - versions so opposite in their tone and content that it would be hard to reconcile either with my own memories.  Each contained some truth about the original, but it was a truth that was filtered by, and made to fit, the story that the particular narrator lived within.  For we, and all the characters we write about, live within a story of our devising - one that charts and explains the journey so far, and dictates the course we choose into the future.  One man's hero can all too easily be another man's fool.

Was Prometheus, as Hesiod portrayed him, a liar and a thief who brought suffering down upon the heads of mankind?  Or, were Shelley and Aeschylus correct in painting him as a hero and saviour who was unjustly punished by a jealous Zeus?  Did Oliver Mellors save Constance, or she him?  Or did they both drag each other into darkness?  Was the felling of the Tower of Babel an act of righteousness, or fear?  Is there ever a simple answer?

Is not every story, no matter how complex, still merely a version of a larger truth, trimmed and simplified to fit within our limited understanding of the infinite?  How do we write stories to convey the truth that we think important?  How much fact is lurking within every act of fiction?  From my own experience, quite a bit.

Do I have to "stick to the facts"?  Or change them so as to "protect the innocent"?  I am struck by that meme that occasionaly surfaces on the internet - the one along the lines of "never upset a writer, lest he puts you in his next book, and kills you"

Why should I be nice to the people who have wronged me in the past?  What awful demise can I devise for them - and could it become a best seller?  That meme led to those thoughts, and onwards, page by page, along a road I had never thought to travel - crime writing.  And what an interesting journey it is turning into - a few strokes of the pen have despatched an old foe to an ending I cannot yet reveal (you'll have to buy the book, when it comes out). A few pen-strokes more have revealed some of the motivated, and their motives, and the road promises to have some interesting curves, bends and crests, before the body is found and the truth surfaces.

And yet, truth is stranger than fiction, and the journey through a fictional crime will be more believable, and safer, than revealing all the truths I learned in that Valley.

My Writing Life

My Writing Life.

After decades of furtive scribbling, I have come out, joined a writer's group or two, and discovered the pleasure and success that working with other writers can bring.  Like minded, or utterly different, fellow writers provide support, criticism, confidence, practical advice, and perspective.  They help you understand what you can achieve, despite your qualms and procrastinatory impulses.

They show you other ways of looking at topics, and help you see the value in your own viewpoint, and they bring reality to the most salient advice that any writer (or, for that matter, creative in any field) can receive - just start.  Nothing is achieved if no first step is taken.

Stories are at the core of the way humans learn about and make sense of the world and all its startling and bewildering aspects.  Storytelling is something I have always enjoyed, and the gathering of stories is something we all do, as we continue to build our picture of life and the world it is lived in.

This Blog is to be an outlet for some of those stories, and, possibly, some of the other fields of creativity and leisure I occupy my time committing or performing.  Some of my recent meanderings have been tidied up and hurled into the ether via these creative outlets -

The Wild Goose Literary eJournal
http://nataliemuller.weebly.com/the-wild-goose-literary-e-journal.html

Blue Mountains Library Writers in the Mist
https://altitudewriters.wordpress.com/

Writers in the Mist has published a number of pieces by members of the writer's group that meets on the second Sunday of each month, at Katoomba Library.  Natalie, an editor, writer, and teacher, also has workshops at Katoomba and Springwood Libraries from time to time.

Others in that writing group have already published blogs, and I can recommend those to people interested in life, literature, and the world at large.......

http://offeringsfromthewellspring.blogspot.com.au/

https://jml297.com/

But now, the rain has stopped, and the birds have begun calling to each other. The newly risen creek is chortling and singing as it climbs its banks and tests the hold that each tree and bush has taken upon the earth.

Yesterday, a Pacific Heron waded here, shin deep, searching out tadpoles - today, he would be swept away.  And the tadpoles?